ZS @LogicalDash@mastodon.babycastles.com

Best videogame loot? #gameingTheory

Best videogame for when you're feeling lazy? #gameingTheory

Looks like the rest of #wordHack will not happen, because of the traffic jam currently engulfing the entire east coast

Sorry!

The bear stopped talking in 2014, sorry

Question: are you going to do anything with the interview of the audio recordings? Well, they still have them, but the only thing presently in a museum (the Strong Museum of Play) is edited transcripts with off-the-record stuff taken out

Laine asks for questions about Sierra, smartass asks when Space Quest 7 is coming out

#wordHack

It was fraught because the fire season was getting longer and some subjects were evacuated from their homes at time of interview

Cleon Jones of Ponderosa Printing did the covers and manuals for Sierra On-Line. They're still in business, and still has a lot of the plates. Gave Nooney the first run of each box

#wordHack

Sierra On-Line was in Oakhurst and employed a lot of secretaries and forklift operators and the like. They're still there, and Nooney talked to them

The town still thinks of itself as a major gold rush town. It's got a heritage festival about it. Nooney put up a booth there about Sierra On-Line, right next to the blacksmiths and gold panniers

Their oral research prioritized less visible labor and women, and tried to understand their whole life story

#wordHack

First featured presenter, Laine Nooney

They do history of videogames, currently working on a book about Sierra On-Line

Aug 1982: Steven Levy found a fiberglass grizzly bear in Oakhurst that told you stock prices when you pressed a button. This formed the end of his book Hackers

The bear's still there, but now it recites The Night Before Christmas

Nooney's work is about actually going places and finding weird shit like that, rather than just library research

#wordHack

And the final open projector, Sophie Searcy

Making Faces

https://soph.info/faces

A generative adversarial network, with convolutional something, that generates images of faces

Turns a vector like "has bangs, is old, has makeup" and turns it into a picture

It's like a classifier run in reverse. Learns the "distribution" of the training data, the world of faces

Take a vector of man w. Glasses, subtract man w/o glasses, add woman w/o glasses, you get woman w/ glasses

Now, Andrew Bader and Todd Anderson

Presenting a blog about wordhacky things, https://codearts.tumblr.com

You can submit your own project there! https://codearts.tumblr.com/submit

#wordHack

Next is Matthew R.F. Balousek reading 12 Sexts

Sext: inclement weather is very proud
Sext: I am eaten by an industrial shredder

Generally resembles @wikisext but it's a zine.

https://mrfb.itch.io

#wordHack

Next, Natalie presenting a generative short film Undesired. Made of footage from subway trains

https://undesi.red

@natling

#wordHack

But first, open projector

First presenter is Robin Hill @inthescales

showing her #procJam project, Lyre's Dictionary @lyresdictionary@twitter.com

It glues word roots together and makes up definitions for them, basically just by madlibbing the meanings of the roots together

laterivore (n) one who eats sides

Main data source is https://etymonline.com

https://github.com/inthescales/lyres-dictionary

#wordHack

It's #wordHack with

JASON SCOTT https://textfiles.com @textfiles
LAINE NOONEY https://lainenooney.com
THEADORA WALSH https://theadorawalsh.com
QIANXUN (SALLY) CHEN https://chenqianxun.com